Category: Game Design

Bowja the Ninja Marketing Case Study - Getting Gamers Back To Your Site

Recently I was playing Pencilkid’s game Bowja the Ninja and came across a fun, non-intrusive marketing tactic for Flash game developers or publishers to get traffic back to their site. (It worked on me at least!) For those of you who aren’t familiar with this game, I’ve embedded the game for you to play [...]

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MochiAds for Publishers - Flash games for all!

MochiAds for Publishers is the latest addition to the products and services we give free to you! It’s a sweet solution for website creators, app developers and any other publishers of Flash games to easily search, add and start making money from the MochiAds game catalog!
The key highlights of the Publisher platform:

Access [...]

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Thumbnail Design: A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Plays

I wanted to spend some time on the promotional side of game dev, and talk about the importance of designing a great preview image. When you upload your game to a portal site, it will be swimming amongst a sea of thumbnails, each one competing for visual dominance. This is the first stage of [...]

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How To Make Successful Flash Games

“This is a market of fulfilling instant gratification and capturing the player’s attention as quickly as possible. The player has invested nothing more than bandwidth and a few seconds of their time, so if a game doesn’t captivate them almost instantly they will move on to another game (and there’s a lot of those!) [...]

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Designing Fun: The Art of Losing

There isn’t an official list of laws on game design, but if there were one, ‘the art of losing’ would be near the top of the list. How often do you see a great Flash game with an engaging experience ruined by forcing its players to restart? In an ideal Flash gaming experience, there [...]

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Designing Fun: Learning To Play

When I wake up in the morning and make a pop-tart for breakfast, I don’t read the directions on the box. Why? Some products are just easy to figure out by their consumers. The same fact holds true for Flash games. Most flash games are so simple that a user can figure out [...]

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Gameplay Mechanics Ideas

From my experience, the hardest part about building a game is coming up with good gameplay mechanics. Fortunately for us Sean Howard has been so kind as to share his quest to document 300 different gameplay mechanics. Not only is he writing about each gameplay mechanic, but he’s also illustrated them for [...]

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